Carolyn Dimmick Final PDF.indd - Washington Secretary of State

Hughes: That’s a wonderful name. It has a Miss Marple-ish flavor to it. I’m really
impressed by your mother, and what she did in her time.
Dimmick: She was amazing.
Hughes: Do you have any of her Chadwick Holland mysteries?
Dimmick: Yes, I have a stack of them.
Hughes: Did she make any money writing them?
Dimmick: Like $50 a story. What was more interesting about my mother was she was
entering (writing) contests. Nowadays the contests are just ridiculous, in my opinion,
because there’s so many of them. In those days you had to have a little talent; you had
to write a poem or do this or that. She won a set of Danish Princess Silverplate and gift
certificates. And she was on a talk show one time and they wanted to know the date of
Flag Day, and she knew it right off. She knew everything – a steel trap.
Hughes: I like everything about your mom that I see here in this family picture when you
joined the Supreme Court in 1981: The way she’s holding her purse. The look in her eyes,
like she’s saying, “This is my daughter, and this is what I expected. Carolyn was too social,
but I knew she’d amount to something, and here she is.” And your dad is wearing a vest,
and he looks like a proud Dane.
Dimmick: That’s it. Any good reason to dress right up… An old sod.
Hughes: So what was life like in the Reaber home growing up?
Dimmick: Dad’s gone quite a bit; mother’s writing stories. She didn’t like housework. She
didn’t like cooking.
Hughes: So who cooked?
Dimmick: Well, she did. I mean it was very plain food, no sauces and all that kind of stuff.
Like my daughter now is really into cooking.
Hughes: That’s another thing that’s different today: Everyone’s a “gourmet.”
Dimmick: But it was fine. I went to work at the Seattle P-I and worked there all through
school. The war came along. My brother had been working at the P-I in the Circulation
Department and he got a job in the mail room because everybody was going off to war. So
I took his job in the Circulation Department, from 4 to 9. I was the first person who did a
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